4th April 2011 Archive

“Education fails” stories are an irresistible hot-button for even moderate media, let alone those on the right wing. So it is that when the Industry Skills Councils – an umbrella group of skills research and lobby organisations – announced that half Australia’s working-age adults have inadequate literacy or numeracy skills, the story caught like wildfire.

Advanced Micro Devices is in a number of tight spots at the moment, but the company is hopefully optimistic that its future "Bulldozer" Opteron processors due later this year will let it dig in and grab some desperately needed - and profitable - server market share from archrival Intel.

Legendary Liverpool soccer stars John Barnes, 48, and Ian Rush, 50, were recently reunited at the launch of car maker Hyundai's Boot Shoot app. Sure, they can still chip balls into hatchbacks 'til the ref cries 'foul' - but does tech win like the beautiful game?

The good burghers of the French town Neuville-en-Ferrain will no longer be able to enjoy the ample charms of a "patriotic female statue" after the mayor ordered its removal from the town hall on the grounds of excessive chesticles.

The International Space Station was given a shove by supply ships docked to it over the weekend in order to evade a cloud of high-velocity orbital shrapnel created when a Russian military satellite crashed into an Iridium comsat in 2009.

The video senders of yesterday didn’t enjoy the best of reputations. Typically used to route the analogue feed of one VCR to a second TV at the other end of the house, they suffered all manner of RF interference. Even when you managed to align their directional antennas, ghostly gremlins would make for a second rate viewing experience.

Lawyer Jeremy Phillips of the useful and fun IPKat blog floats an interesting idea. Google won't reform or be chastened, he writes. We should consider breaking up Google into a number of "Baby Googles" – just as AT&T was once broken up into a number of "Baby Bells".

Britain’s biggest ever computer crime investigation, Operation Ore, was flawed by a catalogue of “discrepancies, errors and uncertainties”, disclosed reports of two national police conferences seen by The Register reveal.

Copyright scofflaw Google and the creative industries are locking horns once again, in a billion dollar legal case with implications for what internet companies can and can't do – or at least, American internet companies. Essentially, the case boils down to how much a service provider is allowed to "know" about infringement before it becomes part of the problem, and therefore liable.

NASA has knocked back the last launch of space shuttle Endeavour from 19 April to 29 April to avoid a "scheduling conflict" with the Russian Progress supply vehicle - slated to dock with the International Space Station on the 29th of this month.

Google has bid $900m for Nortel's patent portfolio, saying it hopes to use the portfolio to deter lawsuits against not only Google but also partners and open-source developers working on projects such as Android and Chrome.